A couple of weeks back, at the IBF Panel discussion on PaaS, we were discussing the opportunity for a Private PaaS. While a Private Cloud is typically associated with IaaS, I started to ponder on the value of a Private PaaS offering.

Microsoft’s announcement of Windows Azure Appliance at WPC underscores the significance of the Private PaaS. This appliance will remove the overhead of maintaining and running an environment to host applications. VMware is aggressively positioning it’s Spring framework on both Private and Public PaaS offerings. AppScale, the open source implementation of Google App Engine on EC2 and other standard VMs has a huge potential to become a Private PaaS. IBM WebSphere Cloudburst Appliance is another implementation of the Private PaaS. These appliances come with complete self-service capabilities and reduce the provisioning of development, test and production environments from days to few hours.

Let’s take a look at the scenarios and potential customers for the Private PaaS –

• Service Providers / Managed Data Centers – These are the next generation ISPs and companies who are into managed data center operations. By deploying PaaS in a box, they can focus on delivering the service to its customers vs. managing it. The multi-tenant capability which is core to the PaaS appliance will provide an isolated snapshot of the environment to the PaaS consumers.

• System Integrators – Large System Integrators who offer turnkey IT solutions can now offer PaaS to their strategic customers. This will enable SIs to deliver an end to end solution to the customers. System Integrators can now offer SLAs which are covered by the PaaS appliance providers. Customers will see value in this deal because the SI will own the entire lifecycle of the solution. This will also address the data security and compliance issues by keeping the sensitive data within the political boundaries of the country. I personally see this as a huge opportunity for the System Integrators in India.

• Large Enterprises – Large automotive, manufacturing and finance companies with presence all over the globe will be able to benefit from these PaaS appliances. By deploying a few in strategic locations, they will be able to reduce the maintenance cost of running Line of Business applications.

• Government – One of the niche customers of the PaaS appliance would be Government. By deploying state level appliances, the government will be able to create a secure Government Private Cloud. Since this runs within the premises of the government data centers, compliance and regulatory issues will not be a concern. Government can confidently store the data and run applications running a set of appliances deployed across the country.

This is an interesting space to watch. Do you see the potential for Private PaaS?

[This article was originally published in the Cloud Computing Journal]

Janakiram MSV is a Cloud Computing Strategist specializing in industry's leading Cloud Computing offerings. Whether you are a developer, architect or an entrepreneur, he can help you get started on the Cloud Computing strategy. Janakiram comes with 10 years of experience in engaging with businesses on architecting enterprise solutions.

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It is a good sign that Google has decided to expose their Storage API based on Amazon S3 API. Eucalyptus Walrus Storage API is completely compatible with S3.

There has been a discussion on standardizing the API for the Cloud Storage. What fueled this discussion further is a poll that ReadWriteWeb.com ran on their site.

Poll from readwriteweb.com (as on 7/15)

Let’s get back to the original discussion on Cloud Storage API standards.
If we look back in history, the industry faced exactly the same challenge in the late 80s when the RDBMS market started to explode. Businesses didn’t want to suffer from lock-in and developers wanted flexibility at the API level. During the transition from monolithic to Client / Server, Open Database Connectivity (ODBC) became the de-facto standard. Every DB vendor shipped their own libraries that adhered to the ODBC standard and developers could switch the libraries at runtime to talk to multiple databases. The front-end applications were completely insulated from the back-end.

For Cloud, we fortunately have the standards as the Lowest Common Denominator. What is common across all the APIs is that they are based on HTTP, REST, XML and SOAP. That makes it easy for abstractions to surface. What we need now is a Cloud version of ODBC. Let me take the risk of calling this as Open Cloud Storage Connectivity API. I am visualizing an architecture that looks something like this:

Open Cloud Storage Connectivity

This is based on the factory method pattern which is used by many enterprise architects. With this, a change in the configuration file will load the appropriate library for the target Storage service. This will be transparent to the Cloud Storage Consumer.

I already see this coming! Take a look at jClouds and Apache libcloud . The future of Cloud Storage is bright and exciting! What do you feel about the standardization of the Cloud Storage API?

Janakiram MSV is a Cloud Computing Strategist specializing in industry's leading Cloud Computing offerings. Whether you are a developer, architect or an entrepreneur, he can help you get started on the Cloud Computing strategy. Janakiram comes with 10 years of experience in engaging with businesses on architecting enterprise solutions.

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IBF Media has been running a series of events called Capital Connection 2010 which is focused on serving the needs of entrepreneurs looking to connect with participants in the venture capital eco-system, technology executives, and to get access to capital and resources to help build their growing enterprises.

IBF Media PaaS Panel Discussion

The latest in the series was a panel discussion on ‘Cloud Platforms and Solutions: Business Models and Architectures for Value Creation in the Enterprise’. The emphasis was more on the value that Platform as a Service (PaaS) brings to an enterprise. The organizers managed to get the best PaaS providers in the business – Google, Microsoft and OrangeScape. While I represented Microsoft Corporation as the subject matter expert on Windows Azure, we had Rajdeep Dua from Google to provide the Google App Engine context. Suresh Sambandam, CEO of OrangeScape PaaS (which incidentally supports both GAE and Azure) was also one of the panelists. The session was moderated by Raghavan Subramanian from Infosys who did a great job of asking very relevant questions to the panel and driving a meaningful discussion.

The discussion was very lively and made it interesting and valuable for the attendees and panelists. I want to share the answers to the questions that were asked in the panel. This represents only the points that I shared and not the views of other panelists in the discussion.

Q) What does your company offer in terms of PaaS? What are the key differentiators?
A) Microsoft’s PaaS offering is called Windows Azure Platform.

There are three key services within this –

• Windows Azure – The Cloud OS from Microsoft
• SQL Azure – Relational Database for the Cloud
• Windows Azure AppFabric – Bridge between on-premise and Cloud Services

Key differentiators –

• Based on familiar .NET Platform
• Great integration with Visual Studio and 3rd party tools
• Reliable SLAs for the enterprise
• Integration with on-premise assets
• Choice of storage between relational (SQL Azure) and non-relational (Azure Storage)

IBF Media PaaS Panel Discussion

Q) What is the threat faced from the layers above (SaaS) and below (IaaS) PaaS?
A) I believe the line drawn between IaaS and PaaS is blurring slowly. Windows Azure is clearly a meta-platform and customers can run Java, PHP, Perl along with .NET applications. Worker role and Native Execution mode enables to port legacy applications to Azure. Since Microsoft also plays in the SaaS layer through the Microsoft Online services, it is an opportunity for us rather than threat. We encourage ISVs to build SaaS offerings on Azure.

Q) Who is the target audience? Is it ISVs or enterprise?
A) Our target audience is the following –

• ISV – Offer SaaS based solutions of their existing or new applications
• Enterprise – Move seasonal and on-demand Line of Business (LoB) applications to Azure
• Start-up – Go live quickly by avoiding up-front investment in infrastructure
• System Integrators – Offer migration and integration of Cloud Services

Q) What is the role of standards for lowering the entry barrier?
A) Standards are applicable at multiple levels. Here are a few

• Security Standards – Azure is SAS70 complaint
• Industry Standards – Supporting industry specific standards like HIPAA
• Open Standards – Azure storage, compute and management APIs are based on open standards like HTTP, XML and REST.

Q) Are there Cloud friendly languages? Do programming languages need new constructs to target cloud capabilities like multi-tenancy?
A) Developers interact with the Cloud in one of the two ways –

• Consume APIs and interact with the Cloud through the management API
• Develop applications that get deployed on the Cloud platform

For consuming the APIs, any language with support for HTTP libraries will work. More than languages the frameworks like .NET and Java need to evolved to support Cloud. For example .NET developers are able to leverage the LINQ constructs to interact with the Cloud storage efficiently.

IBF Media PaaS Panel Discussion

Q) How do you assure continuity of business? Are you a viable and reliable vendor for the enterprises to bet their business on your Cloud platform?
A) Microsoft has been in the data center business for 15 years. Hotmail was acquired in 1977, Outlook Web Access (OWA) was launched 11 years ago. Hosted Exchange processes more than 1 billion messages per month. More than 2000 institutions signed up for Live@Edu with millions of email accounts. Enterprise customers trust us as we have been a credible player for more than a decade. Windows Azure has the right level of SLAs defined which raises the confidence level of our customers.

Q) How about 3rd party components and licensing on the Cloud?
A) Most of the component vendors are aligning with the Cloud. Players like PayPal started to offer services for the SaaS developers by collaborating with PaaS providers. Companies like Twilio are bringing telephony to the Cloud. Most of the components will evolve to support the new paradigm.

Janakiram MSV is a Cloud Computing Strategist specializing in industry's leading Cloud Computing offerings. Whether you are a developer, architect or an entrepreneur, he can help you get started on the Cloud Computing strategy. Janakiram comes with 10 years of experience in engaging with businesses on architecting enterprise solutions.

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Last week, I had the opportunity to present at the DevCon 2010 event hosted by the Kerala Microsoft User Group. I am thoroughly impressed by the quality of the event. The event organizers handled it very professionally. I am impressed by the hospitality and the overall quality of the event.

I delivered the keynote on ‘Cloud – The Platform of the Platforms’ and a session which was an end-to-end demo of developing a Cloud application on Azure. You can download the slide deck from the talks sections of my website.

Find the complete report on K-MUG.org.

My good friend and MVP from Bangalore, Vijay Raj (Popularly known as MSIGeek (@msigeek) also presented on App Compat in Win7 and Office 2010. You can find his trip report here.

Janakiram MSV is a Cloud Computing Strategist specializing in industry's leading Cloud Computing offerings. Whether you are a developer, architect or an entrepreneur, he can help you get started on the Cloud Computing strategy. Janakiram comes with 10 years of experience in engaging with businesses on architecting enterprise solutions.

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Cloud Computing can be realized through multiple implementation models. One of the implementations that is gaining a lot of interest is the Private Cloud.  This article attempts to look at the key attributes of an ideal Private Cloud and takes a futuristic view of the Private Cloud in an enterprise from the IaaS perspective.

Private or Public, every Cloud implementation has to respect four key tenets. They are

1. Elasticity
2. Pay-By-Use
3. Self Service
4. Programmability

Elasticity gives the illusion of infinity. Consumers of the Cloud will be able to scale up, scale out or scale down based on the demand for resources. Since this happens on the fly, applications can instantly scale to meet the demand.

Pay-By-Use turns the CAPEX to OPEX. Instead of investing in a server farm upfront, the cost can be distributed based on the usage of resources. This is a significant benefit offered by the Cloud.

Self Service drives the adoption of Cloud by reducing the middle men. Since there is no human intervention required to perform standard operations, consumers will be in control of their infrastructure and needs.

Programmability enables the integration of Cloud with existing business logic and organizational workflow. This makes the Cloud truly democratic by opening up APIs that can be consumed in multiple ways.

These tenets of the Private Cloud offer quite a few benefits to the IT departments. Let’s see how these align with the typical operations that the IT department performs.

• Seasonal / On-demand need for servers – This sounds very familiar to IT Managers. How many times did you walk out of a leadership meeting where you were asked to quickly setup an intranet site to support the new management initiative? Sometimes this becomes a non-negotiable ask from the management and there is no scope to explain what it takes to setup a new server. You cannot afford to wait till the vendor delivers a new server and to setup the right software stack on it. It is a long cycle before you provision your server for the consumption of internal employees and groups. There is yet another classic scenario that IT managers will relate to. During certain seasonal events like performance review and internal evaluation, you have to reallocate resources to meet the demand. Provisioning and de-provisioning these servers is expensive, laborious and time consuming. This is where the Elasticity attribute of the Cloud will help you. You can have a set of templates of virtual server images that can be quickly provisioned. These templates will have the baseline software preinstalled in them. So the turnaround time is very less.  For seasonal demands, just increase the number of virtual servers powering the internal application and you have instant scalability. Once you have passed the peak season, scale down by resetting your virtual server count.
• Metering and Billing for resource consumption -  Servers and datacenters are expensive resources. It costs money for the organization to setup and maintain them. It is important to prioritize the resource usage to get better RoI from the datacenter. The organization might want to provide more resources to a department that is delivering a mission critical project. To discourage the misuse of the resources, organizations can enable a charge back model for the infrastructure usage. That way, they can monitor, track and optimize the usage of the resources. The report that gets generated at the end of the fiscal year will provide an interesting insight into the Total Cost of Ownership of your datacenter. The Pay-By-Use attribute of Private Cloud brings you these capabilities.
• Bring IT close to the employees – While most of the IT departments have a portal to request new servers and the provisioning, there is a lot of manual processes involved in completing these tasks. With a Private Cloud, authorized employees and  managers will feel empowered because they are in control of their infrastructure requirements. Most of the manual process will be eliminated by scripting and automating the provisioning of virtual servers. With appropriate workflow and approvals in place, the Self Service attribute enables the organization to realize the promise of the dynamic datacenter.
• Respect the organization policies and workflow  – Every organization has well defined set of policies for procurement and provisioning of resources. When IT turns into a commodity, it should integrate with existing workflows. With the promise of dynamic datacenter, you want to automate the whole cycle of provisioning new resources. This involves programming the Private Cloud and treat it like any other business logic. For example, when an employee requests for a new server, his manager will approve it and send it for approval to the IT manager. After all the approvals are given, the system should automatically provision the server and send a mail to all the stakeholders. Similarly, the IT manager might want to generate reports that help him understand the usage of the resources by cost center and a further breakup of no. of virtual servers deployed per cost center. The Programmability of the Private Cloud will enable all these scenarios.

Now that we have seen what to expect from a Private Cloud, I want to walk you through a fictitious scenario that depicts the benefits.

ABC Consulting Services is a software consulting company that is into the business of system integration and custom software development. There are about 1500 employees across various departments that include HR, Finance, Sales and Marketing, Development, Operations and IT.  Every time the sales team gets a new order for delivering a custom software solution, a new team is established to get started on the development project. After compiling the requirements for the new development and testing environment, the Project Head sends a request to the IT Manager to provision the required infrastructure. After a few rounds of negotiation, the development team and IT agree on the requirements and the timeline for provisioning it. The timeline might be anywhere from a few weeks to a couple of months. IT department works in the background to reassign unused resources and ordering new servers to complete the setup. While IT was busy with this, there are a couple of more projects and soon they realized that they are spreading too thin in the process of meeting the demand from the internal project teams. Meanwhile, the management has formed a taskforce to evaluate the TCO of current IT environment. The taskforce is asked to propose new ways to increase the efficiency of the datacenter.

Let’s look at some of the issues at ABC Consulting Services -

• Long turnaround time for provisioning
• IT has dependency on external server vendors
• Project teams have dependency on IT
• Unpredictable work loads and demands for provisioning
• Lack of resource optimization
• Manual reassignment and reallocation of resources
• Lack of ability to track IT usage by project

How can a Private Cloud help ABC Consulting Services? Here is the after effect of adopting a Private Cloud -

The Project Head will logon to an internal portal to request the provisioning of the new environment. A mail goes to the IT Manager to review the request. The IT Manager will access the Server Utilization dashboard of the internal IT portal which shows him the typical patterns of utilization of the physical servers and the virtual servers in the datacenter. After a quick negotiation with the Project Head, the IT Manager will approve the modified request. A provisioning task gets assigned to an IT administrator who will logon to the Private Cloud Control Panel to choose the right set of Virtual Server images from the library of server images. He will then choose a script to create a virtual network of these servers. Once the script is complete, the IT Administrator gets an email that the provisioning is complete and ready to be tested. Once he is convinced, he will mark the task as completed and that results in the IT Manager and the Project Head receiving a notification that the environment is ready. Periodically, IT Manager will be able to generate reports that explain the utilization of the physical and virtual resources per department / project. He can then send a bill to individual Project Heads based on their consumption.

What issues did the Private Cloud solve?

• Reduced turnaround time for provisioning (from few weeks to few hours)
• Reduced dependencies on external vendors (due to better utilization of existing servers)
• Predictable workloads based on the patterns established over a period of time
• Highly optimized resources due to dynamic allocation of virtual servers
• Dynamic assignment and on-the-fly reallocation of resources
• Complete visibility into the usage of physical and virtual servers

I personally believe that the future of every IT department is a Private Cloud. Do you agree with my viewpoint?

Janakiram MSV is a Cloud Computing Strategist specializing in industry's leading Cloud Computing offerings. Whether you are a developer, architect or an entrepreneur, he can help you get started on the Cloud Computing strategy. Janakiram comes with 10 years of experience in engaging with businesses on architecting enterprise solutions.

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